


Wide Open

by Xero_Sky



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Chuck and Yancy lived, Complicated Relationships, Ghost Drifting, I'm bad at tags, M/M, No uprising, Panic Attack, Road Trip, in which case I guess it is, not incest unless you want to read it that way, post-pitfall au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-28
Updated: 2018-06-28
Packaged: 2019-05-30 00:10:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15084788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xero_Sky/pseuds/Xero_Sky
Summary: Sometimes not knowing where you're going is the best way to get there.





	Wide Open

“Jesus Christ, what’s taking so long?” Yancy complains into his phone, waving one hand dramatically.  “We’re losing daylight.”

He paces around the car, trying to spin off some nervous energy.  The dome’s intake lot is empty except for him and one last truck waiting to be scanned before they let it into the loading docks.  There’s nothing here to look at except the massive curve of the dome on one side and the perimeter fence on the other.  The sky is blue, the sun is warm for spring in Alaska, and the lot needs resurfacing soon.  Other than that, the security guards are the only thing worth noting out here, and they’re pretending they’re not paying any attention to him. 

The urge to flip them off is strong, but Yancy’s almost, _almost_ out of here for good, and the last thing he needs is more hassle from Security. Now that the war’s over, the PPDC’s been picking itself up and shaking itself off, and Security’s gone back to making sure that every ‘i’ is dotted and every ‘t’ crossed.  In triplicate.  Christ.

“Be there in a minute, drama queen,” Raleigh finally tells him, after talking to someone else for a while even though Yancy’s still on the phone with him. “I ran into someone, but I’m on my way.”

Then he hangs up, because that’s a normal, adult way to end a call, right?  Exasperated, Yancy tosses his own phone into the front seat and goes back to pacing, jingling his keys in one hand. The SUV he’d bought months ago and hardly gotten to drive since then had fingerprint-sensitive locks and the whole bit, but keys are just so much more satisfying.  He’d never had his own car before, unless you counted that old beater truck Richard had left behind when he abandoned them.  This one is shiny and new and loaded with every extra possible, and it’s his free and clear; he’d paid cash for it the day his back pay had hit the bank.

The few things he and his brother own that aren’t PPDC-issued have been stuffed in back, but it’s not even close to full.  There’s a set of chains and an emergency kit in there somewhere, just in case, because this is Alaska, and there is snow for days in their future, no matter where they end up. 

Yancy doesn’t much care where that place is, as long as it’s not here.  Or on any other PPDC property.

He’s given more than a decade of his life to the war.  He’d never promised them the rest of it. 

He’s not hanging around to be a trained spokesmonkey.  The UN has plans for the PPDC, and the smaller organization isn’t big enough to fend them off forever. 

He’s not going to spend his life telling people how much Knifehead had sucked, what it was like being in a coma, or what the years between waking up and Stacker Pentecost turning up to offer the Beckets a suicide mission had been like.  He’d said all he had to say about the Breach, about packing his brother into an escape pod so that Gypsy couldn’t take both of them down.  About the personal hell of being locked in his own escape pod for three days before they found him.

Besides, Yancy’d been in it for the jaegers, and it’s clear that neither of the Beckets is going to get a shot at one of the new fancy beasts they’re talking about building.  Both of them have some level of brain damage, and Yancy has picked up a collection of parts that’re still going to be shiny and new when his bones turn to dust. 

So he’s done.

And Raleigh’s coming with him.

There isn’t any choice about that last part.  Not anymore.

If Raleigh had really wanted to stay, if he’d actually been in love with Mako, Yancy would’ve figured out a way to stay too, for him. 

The Beckets are a package deal these days, as if they’d ever not been before.

It’s too late for anything else.  Gypsy had torn them apart and melded them together too many times for any future without each other.  Yancy had tried to imagine it, for the kid’s own good, sketching out lives lived apart, jobs and relationships and families springing up without each other to share them with, and he hadn’t been able to do it.  He just… How were they supposed to be alone now?

It’d been zero surprise that Raleigh’d been just as ready to leave as he was. 

It’s not all that much of a surprise that he’s late now, either.

Last day in the PPDC, separation papers already in hand, gear packed, affairs in order, and here he is again, waiting on Raleigh to get his ass down here, probably because his little brother had managed to run into the last person in Alaska he hadn’t already said goodbye to.  He’s always been the sentimental one. They don’t have a schedule or anything like it, but Yancy’s itching to _go_.

He’s said his goodbyes.

What the fuck is taking the kid so long anyway?  Jesus.

He digs around and finds his phone on the floor underneath the passenger’s seat, getting ready to yell at his brother again when he hears his name.

“Hey, Yance, guess what I found!”

His first thought is that Raleigh’s somehow gotten a little bit of his swagger back.  The second is – hey, will you look –

Fuck.

It’s Chuck Hansen. 

Tanned, tall, hair longer and lighter than they remembered, and just looking damned fine, really. Unfairly fine.

And, shit, he’s got a beard now.

It’s like he went through a list of Yancy’s weaknesses and made sure he had them all covered.

Which, these days, means he’s hit all of Raleigh’s buttons too.  Fuck.

His brother just winks at him and grins.

The prodigal Hansen had been at loose ends when the world was saved and no one was expecting him to die in a blaze of glory any longer.  He’d been lost and angry and still in a lot of pain, and the last, cataclysmic fight he’d picked with Herc had been too much.  Of course, Herc throwing his ass out of the dome and telling him not to come back for six months had also been a little too much.

Herc, and presumably Chuck, had dealt stoically through the separation, something neither Becket could quite imagine for themselves.   Every pair of Rangers is different, though.

And here’s Chuck now, and there’s the dimples, even if they’re a little fuzzier now. 

Goddamnit.

“’Sup, Hansen.”

Smooth as fuck, right?  Right.

“Hey, Becket,” Chuck answers casually, setting down his duffle bag with a thud.

“How long’ve you been back?”

“Since last night.”

Has Chuck always had lashes that long?

Yancy gets a wash of something warm and gleeful through the drift, and narrows his eyes.

“So I had this idea,” Raleigh starts, but Chuck finishes for him.

“You mind if I come along?”

Yancy blinks at him.  “What?”

“On the Becket Brothers World Tour to Nowhere,” Raleigh says helpfully, slinging an arm around Yancy’s shoulders.

The ghost drift has a strong thread of approval woven through it, but Yancy exchanges a look with his brother first anyway.  Raleigh is still recovering from his own injuries, but he doesn’t look as exhausted as he usually does, and the playful smile he gives Yancy tells him everything he wants to know.

Okay, then.

“That all your stuff?” Yancy points at the duffle.

“Sure,” Chuck says.  “Haven’t even unpacked.”

“You talk to your dad?” Yancy asks, trying not to frown.  No matter how much he doesn’t mind taking Chuck with them (sure, Chuck’s an asshole, but, honestly, so are he and Raleigh), he’s not getting involved in the Hansen thing. 

Especially not by giving Chuck a way to dodge his dad, if that was what he’s looking for.  Herc deserves better.

“Yeah. Been talking to him for months now, anyway,” Chuck tells them. “It’s easier when he’s not in my head, you know?”

He’s not bristling or glaring at them for even asking.  This casual openness is a lot more like the Chuck who’d grown up around them, the one who didn’t feel like the whole world depended on his suicide mission.

“Yeah, we know,” Raleigh answers for them both, because they could understand. It wasn’t how they worked, but they got it.

“Is he okay with this?” Yancy asks doggedly. “Cause I’m gonna be pissed if he has attack helos chase us across Canada or wherever.”  It’s kind of a stupid thing to ask, because it’s not like Chuck needs permission, but, shit, Herc’s a good guy.  Also, occasionally terrifying.

“Don’t worry,” Chuck tells them, all but rolling his eyes. “If he changes his mind, he’ll just have snipers take you out before you know what hit you. Probably do it himself.”

“Well, it’s the personal touch that makes all the difference,” Yancy sighs, giving into the inevitable. “Saddle up, kids.  We’ve got places to go.”

Yancy hits the button that lifts the tail gate, and Raleigh beams at him as he moves to help Chuck heave his bag into the back. 

They manage to pile into the SUV like teenagers, even though it’s been hard years and miles of even harder road since they were.

“Where to first?” Chuck asks, sprawling out across the back seat.  He’s a little too tall to be comfortable back there forever, and Yancy foresees endless arguments over who sits where ahead of them.

“Fuck if I know,” he answers cheerfully, starting the engine.  God, it feels good to get moving.

There’s a bright streak of happiness in the drift, and neither Becket cares who it came from first.

Raleigh puts on his sunglasses and leans back in his seat.  Pointing straight ahead, at the street, at Anchorage, at all the world in front of them, he says “Hit it.”

They do.

 

*******

You can see a lot in six months.

At first they try the big things, the things they think they probably should see because, you know, _America_.  They’re planning on doing the same to Australia later on, because Chuck actually hasn’t seen much of it outside the Shatterdomes, and, you know, it’s _Australia_.  For now, though, they head south and meander towards the east.

They hit Disneyworld because none of them have ever been there, and it’s just been reopened now that water and gas rationing’s been lifted.  It ends badly, with them spending over an hour holed up in a bathroom near the Haunted Mansion by an excited mob. Their half-assed disguises had worked well enough on the trip there, but the Disney crowd had them pegged immediately, and Disney Security had to be called in to save the day.  They’d turned down the offer of a special tour, and ended the night in Orlando at some kind of weird safari-themed bullshit bar with surprisingly good beer.  And monkeys.  Raleigh’s almost convinced that those were real monkeys in the cage wall behind the bar.

They backtrack, up the coast back into Canada.  Mexico is one of the few countries that doesn’t honor their PPDC passports, so when they come back down, they stop at the border, but that’s the only limit for now.  They wander.  They see things. 

They weren’t paying attention to the signs when they went to the Smithsonian, and so they weren’t prepared when they walked into an exhibition called _Jaeger: Man and Machine_. Drive suits, uniforms, jaeger parts, schematics, an early Pons unit, and dozens of other things are carefully displayed in secure cases with dramatic lighting.  There are pictures of every Ranger who ever made it into a jaeger, along with brief biographies and video of them in action. 

Most of those pilots are dead, and seeing them like that, without warning, is like visiting a grave.  They can’t stand it.

On the way out, Raleigh comes face to face with Yancy’s first drive suit and freezes.  He hasn’t seen it since the med techs cut it off of his brother’s nearly frozen body, and the damage to it – the fractures, the gaping holes, and the saw marks -- has been carefully preserved.  There are dark brown streaks that he remembers better as gore.  The armor, missing the circuit suit, is mounted on a frame that shows how it would’ve been worn, and as it stands there, pinned into place and showing all its wounds, all Raleigh can think of is an autopsy.

White-faced, he stumbles as Yancy and Chuck try to get him out of there, and the museum staff ends up helping them make it outside through a cloud of curious visitors.  Chuck bundles the brothers into the backseat and drives, taking them anywhere else, as Yancy holds his shivering brother close, talking him through it.  It’s been a long time since Raleigh’s had a panic attack, but they remember.

Chuck’s never seen one before, though, and as it turns out, he’s _furious_.

Not with them.  With them he’s only calm and solicitous, doing whatever he can but not intruding more than that.  He’s always been a professional when it counted.

He does call his dad, though, when he thinks the brothers are asleep, and demands that Herc get the drive suit pulled from the exhibition.  _His blood is still all over it, for fuck’s sake!_

Herc must agree with him, because Chuck winds down until they end on a much friendlier note.

No one talks about the museum again, but Yancy does notice, a few days later, a small news article mentioning that his suit has been removed from it at request of the PPDC. It’d been a surprise for him to see it but not particularly upsetting.  He has no memories of anything between the kaiju alarm going off that morning and waking up in the hospital months later, and so he doesn’t really own the whole Knifehead shitshow the way Raleigh does. Still, he doesn’t mind knowing it’s headed out of sight and hopefully out of mind again.

He forwards the article to Chuck and enjoys the man’s slow smile when he reads it.  They nod at each other, but neither says a word.  Raleigh’s got his seat tipped back and his sunglasses on, and he doesn’t notice a thing that isn’t music, sunshine, and the warm breeze.

Yancy loves him so much.

He doesn’t miss the fond smile Chuck sends Raleigh’s way, either.

********

In the end, most of their time is spent on the open road.  The need to see what come next gets under their skin right away, and they run with it. They hit every park, monument, and dusty ‘attraction’ the highway has to offer, mostly because they can but they always move on.  They’re out to witness the whole goddamned world.

They camp out, sleep in the truck, sleep in sketchy motels, sleep in high-end hotels, and call in favors here and there.  Sometimes it’s rough and sometimes it’s not.  Shit, they’ve spent their whole adult lives in the military, and none of this is the worst thing.

They have no schedules, no appointments, and no one else’s expectations to live up to.  It’s almost dizzying.  Chuck, no longer carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, says it’s like being in free fall, and sighs, too content to admit to melancholy.

The three of them get along in close quarters better than they expected, although at first they still get a warm glow in the mornings when they find no one’s been murdered in his sleep. 

Their fights are mostly verbal and full of posturing, because no matter what they’re working out, the crushing responsibility of the war is gone, and the wild anger and walking despair of those days has faded away.  Even their words wear down, softening at the edges, until their arguments are less about anger and more about the points they’re trying to make. 

Somewhere in Kansas, Yancy indulges his dad instincts and threatens to throw them both out on their asses if they don’t stop bickering.  When he finally does it, they find him about two miles down the road at a gas station/fast food cluster on the highway, reading a book and eating what are probably chicken nuggets.  Breaded white meat, anyway.  Sulking and tired, Raleigh and Chuck climb in without saying a word.

An hour later, they’re arguing again, this time over movies, but the anger and the hurtfulness are gone.

The next time Yancy threatens, they make fun of him until he taps the brakes, and then the argument magically evaporates, although neither of them will admit to it.  They’re not sure how Yancy got them both out of the car the first time, but they’re not risking it again.

Somewhere along the line, Raleigh gets drunk and sentimental, and tells Yancy they need to adopt Chuck as their little brother (even though _little brother_ is not _quite_ the subtext that comes through the drift).  Yancy’s thoughts aren’t quite as innocent as his face, but he pegs a bag of chips at his brother’s head anyway, and Raleigh breaks into an epic pout to hide the thin, warm thread of desire that runs through their drift.

Chuck doesn’t guess that there are multiple levels involved here, but he knows funny when he sees it. He has his phone out and the picture forwarded to Herc before Raleigh can even try to wrestle it out of his hands.

It won’t be the first time Herc’s gotten unexplained pictures.  The Hansens are in contact, by text or video or picture or, god help them all, voice, every single day.  Without fail.  The Beckets look for any excuse not to be around during the calls. Listening to the two of them figure out how to communicate like adults is just the worst. The Hansens are awkward and earnest and sometimes it feels like the words are being jerked out of them, extracted like teeth.  Neither brother says a word about it to Chuck, though.  Some lines are best left uncrossed. 

They’ve learned how to live together.

They were always going to stand up for each other, but it doesn’t take long before they’re looking out for each other, too.

There turns out to be more of a need for that than they bargained for, but they’re up for it.

The country they cross is just settling back into itself.  It’s been pulled out of its frame in every direction, it’s taken more damage than it knows, but the old patterns of life are reasserting themselves.  The cities near the East coast are desperate to pretend that everything is normal again; the West coast doesn’t have the same luxury.  Between those, in the ‘heartland’, the fractures run deeper and are harder to hide.

Whole towns had dried up when the services they needed to keep going were diverted for the war effort; fuel and transportation were the first to be cut back.  A lot of resources – mines, farms, and ranches – had been nationalized after the damage done to the western states.  The draft had taken their sons and daughters, most of whom are coming back now with stories of a war a lot more horrible than what they’d seen on TV.   

There is a lingering bitterness in many places.

In some towns, just being well-fed and able to afford gas are suspicious qualities. Half-familiar strangers find no welcome there, and sometimes a fist ends up thrown.  These are the places that teach them to look out for each other.  The stories they take away with them weave them tighter together. 

It costs them a few stitches here and there.  Once a local doctor, roused out of his bed after midnight, gets an eyeful of the scars on Chuck’s torso and apologizes on behalf of his town, Wyoming, and essentially the Western half of the United States for the assholes who’d tried to rough him up.

Most places aren’t like that.  A lot of people either don’t recognize them or just give them their privacy.  They sign a few things, take a few photos, and turn down every special kindness except one: a container of home-made cookies. The white-haired baker, diminutive but with a ramrod-straight spine, hadn’t been having it, and none of them had enough experience with iron-jawed nanas to turn her down a second time.

The cookies were _amazing_.

*******

Raleigh is walking on the stone wall with his arms held out for balance, and he flashes a grin at his brother, who’s leaning against their vehicle with his arms crossed and looking unimpressed. 

Yancy’s first thought is that Raleigh has probably smiled more since they left than he did in the 6 years previous, and it looks damned good on him.  The second is that the dumb shit is going to get himself killed at a rest stop in Nowhere, California because the far side of that waist-high wall is a sheer drop for about 300 feet. 

The thought occurs that maybe his brother had been living on adrenaline and fear for too long.  Maybe he ultimately won’t be able to adapt to life without it.

“And maybe you should lighten the fuck up,” Raleigh tells him, picking the worry right out of the ghost drift.  He goes into a one-legged pose, his balance perfect, and then kicks with the foot he’d been standing on.  Despite months of no training at all, he still kicks higher than his own head and then comes down into a perfect fighting stance.

“Show-off.”

“You know it.”

Still, he hops down off the wall and comes over to stand next to him.  It’s a small concession, but Yancy’s grateful, and Raleigh knows that.

It’s peaceful up here in the late afternoon.  There’s not many cars on the highway, and no one else is at the turn-off with them.  The view is indeed scenic, like the sign had said, and the only consistent sounds are the wind in the trees and Chuck’s footsteps on the gravel as he paces back and forth on the other side of the long, narrow lot, talking to his dad on the phone.

Chuck, it turns out, is physically incapable of standing still when he’s talking to Herc.  If he can’t move around – if he is, for instance, in a moving vehicle with two innocent victims of his kinetic energy – he twitches, and bounces his knees, and fidgets until he drives everyone mad.  The rest area had been a perfectly timed discovery which might just have saved his life this time.

He looks serious now, but whatever Herc’s telling him can’t be that bad.  There’s no thunderclouds building up over his head, for one thing.  Also, he’s laughed a couple of times, and not in the sinister way that meant he’d decided to take horrible revenge on you and just had to figure out the details.

The Beckets speculate quietly on what’s happened to merit this call and that face.  Hansen-watching has become something of a hobby for them, or a sport.  They’ve been known to make bets.

Then the call is over, and Chuck’s striding back towards them, looking purposeful but not upset.

“Dad found Uncle Scott,” he says with no preamble.

That was definitely not on the list of things the brothers had come up with.

“And he wants to know if they can come out and join us. He’s retiring next month.”

The Beckets exchange looks.

They know the real story about Scott Hansen now, in the same way that Chuck knows most their secrets:  if the road trip is long enough, the stories you tell come closer and closer to the truth with each day.

As pilots, they’d been quietly told that Scott had hidden a medical condition, nearly getting both Hansens killed. By Ranger standards, risking your co-pilots life like that was unforgiveable.

The other stories, about Herc finding out something so terrible that he’d beat the shit out of  Scott right in the connpod, had been a media invention, coming straight out of some blogger’s ass and being seized on by people who should’ve known better. 

Once Herc became Marshal, he’d gone through the files.  Scott’s seizure had surprised everyone _but_ Medical, who’d known he had a higher risk for it.  They hadn’t disclosed it to him or anyone else, specifically because the Hansens had such a high handshake and were, quoting the report, ‘valuable media assets’.  The brass, which hadn’t included Pentecost back in those days, had signed off on it.

No one had told the Hansens.

Herc had had no problems with using PPDC resources to hunt his brother down, and he must have fixed things if Scott was willing to go anywhere at all with him now.

That’s not the real problem, though, and Yancy wonders how to approach it.

“How much room do they think we’ve got?” he asks, almost off-handedly.

“How do you feel about boats?” Chuck shoots back, as if that was the only logical answer.

“What?” Raleigh supplies after Yance just blinks at him.

“Well, they’ve got an idea, and Uncle Scott’s gotten his hands on a boat.  Sleeps eight or some such.”

“Did he steal a yacht?” Raleigh laughs.

“It’s Scott,” Chuck grins.  “Who knows?”

They can see in Chuck’s face exactly how much he wants this, but he doesn’t say anything else: just stands there, not quite looking at either one of them.  It’s a big thing, inviting his closest remaining relatives into their little circle, including Max, because of course Max will be coming with Herc. Chuck had left him with his Dad for Max’s own good; the three of them still didn’t know where they were going most of the time, and no dog should live in a car.

Right now, silence stretches between them, until finally Yancy can’t take even a second more of it.  He’s never been able to handle awkward or tense silences, which is probably most of why they’d worked their shit out over the last few months.  He steps up and kisses Chuck, with the familiarity of much practice, and Raleigh lays a hand on his brother’s shoulder.

“You know that there’s no space big enough for them not to notice this,” Yancy says after reluctantly giving Chuck a chance to breathe. Unhappy, he does the right thing.  “Do you want to call it off before they get here?”

He can feel Raleigh glaring at him, because Raleigh very much does not want to call this off, this thing that’s grown up between them, and he’s kind of pissed that Yancy would even suggest it.  None of them had expected it, but the Beckets had at least shared before. Chuck hadn’t known that, and hadn’t wanted to encourage one of them for fear of hurting the other.  Working it out had involved being snowed in at a lodge in BFE North Dakota, a bottle of vodka, and a fight that had almost gone to the ground before they realized how unnecessary it all was.

And now Chuck really wants to see his family again, wants to be together with them in a world where they aren’t all expecting to die in combat soon, and the Beckets… well, they’ll always find their feet again, as long as they have each other.

No matter how much it will hurt.

Chuck takes a deep breath and looks from one Becket to the other.  His lopsided little smile still manages to be ravishing, but, then, his audience is easy for him.

“Told them both already.  Didn’t see any reason to hide it.  The old man doesn’t care, and Uncle Scott called me a greedy bastard and wants to know why I couldn’t have saved one for him.”

There’s a beat while this sinks in. 

“Like he had a shot,” Yancy says eventually, trying to look indignant as Chuck’s smile grows into a smirk.  “Seriously, he—“

Chuck kisses him, because he’s learned the best way to shut Beckets up by now.

Raleigh holds off for a heroic 30 seconds or so, but then he takes on the burden of kissing their Hansen, while Yancy smiles, wondering for the thousandth time how they’d gotten so lucky.

They may not know what they’re doing, and their destination is still unimportant, but this right here? 

This is the best.

And that turns out to be all they need.

 

 


End file.
